Follow Us

More

The 100 Best American Films According to Critics Worldwide

Here at Screen Rant, we like making lists. We've got lists about the best action movies, about movie sidekicks, about how many Goosebumps monsters were featured in the latest trailer. One list that almost every movie fan likes to make, however, is a list of the best movies ever made - whether they're personal favorites, or just films that have stood the test of time and been collectively ranked as the 'greats'.

The BBC recently made its own foray into this never-ending debate with a list of the 100 best American films, according to a poll of 62 film critics from around the world. The critics included academics, bloggers, newspaper reviewers and everyone in between, and the list was calculated using a points system where every critic picked the 10 American films that they thought were best.

In order to qualify as an American film, a title simply had to have been produced by an American studio or funded from an American source - the nationality of the director and the filming locations didn't matter. The result is a list that is, unsurprisingly, pretty conventional. Citizen Kane grabbed the #1 spot, The Godfather took #2 and Vertigo was at #3;. Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and John Ford each had a film in the top 5. There were, however, a few surprises. Check out the full list below.

Best Overall Directors

There were quite a few directors whose name appeared multiple times on the list, but only six who had four or more films declared among the best of all time. Here are the top American directors, in order of the number of films they had on the list and the average ranking of those films.

1) Alfred Hitchock (Notorious at #68, Marnie at #47, North by Northwest at#13, Psycho at #8, Vertigo at #3)

Best Overall Decade

According to this poll, the quality of American films over time takes the form of a rough bell curve, with the industry peaking in the 1970s. The low number of entries from the early decades of film can be attributed to the fact that there simply weren't as many films being made back then, but the 2000s obviously don't have that excuse.

This doesn't, of course, prove that American studios produced objectively better films in the 1940s, '50s and '70s, and that most of the releases from this century have been trash. It takes many years for a film to enter the public consciousness as being classically 'great', and often the test of time is a better measure of worth than initial reviews. Many film critics also come from an academic background, so the type of films that they would have studied as landmark entries in American cinematic history would have been classics like Citizen Kane and The Godfather, rather than whatever was showing in the theaters at the time.

It's also likely that nostalgia played a role in the poll results; films which critics saw in their formative years no doubt made more of an impact than films that they saw after a couple of decades of watching and writing about movies for a living. Critics who grew up in the '70s may naturally be compelled to vote for Star Wars, but in another twenty or thirty years the kids of today might be voting Guardians of the Galaxy into a similar poll.

Here's how the selection of films breaks down by decade.

1) 1970s (21%)

2) 1940s (15% - average rank #42)

3) 1950s (15% - average rank #47)

4) 1980s (13%)

5) 1960s (10%)

6) 1990s (8%)

7) 1930s (7%)

8) 1920s (4%)

9) 2000s (4%)

10) 2010s (2%)

11) 1910s (1%)

Notable Omissions

No doubt just about everyone can think of a favorite American film that didn't make this list, but perhaps the most woefully under-represented category is animated films. The Lion King makes an appearance at #86 and... that's it. This might have something to do with the fact that most of the titles on the list are 'grown-up' films, and family movies in general don't seem to have impressed the critics. Still, it's surprising that no other Walt Disney Animation classics made the list, and Pixar didn't make a single appearance.

There were a few notable directors of American movies who didn't make the list - James Cameron, David Cronenberg, and Wes Anderson among them. Ridley Scott made the list just once, for Thelma and Louise.

Films that didn't make the list include The Shawshank Redemption, King Kong and Midnight Cowboy. None of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies are featured. The only female directors on the list were Maya Deren, who co-directed Meshes of the Afternoon, and Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, who co-directed Grey Gardens. The only comic book movie was The Dark Knight, at #96.